Samuel Bagg

🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]

Misinformation, democratic breakdown, social identity: An excellent set of reflections from @samuel-bagg.bsky.social

Ok, pretty funny of Zohran’s people to put out the absolute model of the sort of statement that drives Bluesky absolutely *insane* to be studiously ignored On Here because of the source

Would love to see someone from the moderate, Majority Dem faction really address and wrestle with the political effects of what Labour has been up to.

Haha, thanks! Hadn’t seen /wasn’t sure amidst the PPE fracas!

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This was very good

Thought you might have institutional access - there’s also scihub

ssrn.com/abstract=268...

If you’re actually interested in how identities very much facilitate the conditions in which misinformation is counteracted, I encourage you to read some of the research linked in the piece. But it seems like you’re not interested in that, so I’m not going to engage further.

You’re making an empirical claim which is in fact false. I cite tons of the empirical research on this in the piece and pointed you towards an important example on the thread. I’m beginning to think you’re not actually interested in that.

Sorry but the article is addressing the most important and influential tradition of democratic theorizing on the left in the second half of the 20th century.

The point which you seem not to accept is that identity is not something you can either have more or less of. If you don’t accept that basic premise then yes you will not have any reason to accept the arguments I make. But the evidence for that proposition is very strong. Take a look at it.

American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been ...

Obviously no group is immune to this, and groups themselves have obligations to improve their epistemic practices. But that’s not the hard problem- the hard problem is getting people to trust those groups. Overall unions are good even if some members are not: see doi.org/10.1111/ajps... and related

Can deliberation neutralise power? - Samuel Bagg, 2018 Most democratic theorists agree that concentrations of wealth and power tend to distort the functioning of democracy and ought to be countered wherever possible...

Definitely didn’t say we should stop trying to address misinformation. It’s both and, but identities is the more often neglected piece. If you want a more developed version of the view, check out doi.org/10.1177/1474...

I do talk there about how healthy epistemic practices are maintained.

I’d encourage you to read some of the psychology literature linked in the piece. Getting rid of identities is not an option. It’s a basic constraint of the problem we’re working with.

Will check this out - looks great!

Thanks!

Excellent post.
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100%. But you gotta start somewhere. Fire on all cylinders.

At least we could still have peaceful transfers of power if we all believe the same lies. (And I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that everything was a lie before. Monopoly media surely had its own biases but not as detached from truth as many fringe sources today.)

Resisting elite capture / oligarchy is the goal. This is one of many necessary means. I write about others elsewhere. But I don’t think you get very far with many of them until you build a mass movement of countervailing power. So identity is a key leverage point.

Ah, very cool - thanks!

Politics is the art of the possible. And in any case, the proposal is not lying to people or keeping them in the dark; not sure where you got that. It’s about nudging people towards social networks and identities that are relatively more epistemically reliable, while also continuing persuasion.

Epistemic training is a good baseline but it’s not foolproof. Even the best trained are still influenced by their social identity. And recognizing this is not the same thing as saying that everyone is a gullible dupe. It’s just garden variety human frailty.

I like this

I don’t think this is an unstoppable trend! But we have to be motivated to stop it.

The way out is “not to ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices, but to weaken their social identification with cranks and conspiracy theorists, and strengthen their identification with the broadly reliable collective practices of science, scholarship, journalism, law, and so on.”

Preaching to the Choir? Rhetoric and Identity in a Polarized Age | The Journal of Politics: Vol 84, No 1 How might discourse generate political change? So far, democratic theorists have focused largely on how deliberative exchanges might shift political opinion. Responding to empirical research that cast...

Can’t put everything in one blog post. But in terms of other forms of rhetoric / persuasion, see www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...